Quality DNA

by Beth Martin

  “Hello, Miss Crow. I’m Federal Agent Clark Burns. A friend of yours is on the way here to pick you up, but I was hoping to ask you a few questions before you leave. Could I please come in?”

  Irene almost laughed. She had no control over whether Agent Clark came in or not. “Please, be my guest,” she said. He opened the door to the cell, and as soon as it closed, the clear walls turned an opaque white, the precinct disappearing behind them.

  He took a seat on the bench which doubled as a bed, and she sat down at the other end. “Where’s Rick?” she asked.

  “I was hoping to ask you the same question. When was the last time you saw Agent Richard Elder?”

  “God, it’s been at least a week,”she said. “What day is it?”

  “It’s Sunday.”

  “Okay, so a week ago this past Saturday. I don’t think I was out for more than a week. Wait, what’s the date?”

  “December seventh. What do you mean you were out?”

  “AQD,” she said. “They kidnapped me.” She wanted to tell him about the medical experiments, but didn’t want Clark to start treating her like she was crazy as well. “Maybe you can help me. I found out what they’ve been up to.”

  Clark shook his head. “I only investigate personnel matters, not terrorism.”

  “Personnel?” her stomach dropped. He had come in asking her questions about Rick, not offering to help with the investigation. “What happened to Rick? Why isn’t he here?”

  “We’re trying to locate him. He went dark while trying to find you.”

  “He didn’t. He didn’t find me,” she said.

  “You’re free to go for now, Miss Crow, but don’t disappear this time. Until you get a new device, keep this with you at all times.” He handed her a small laminated card. The background was the FBI seal and in large blue letters it said ‘asset’. In the bottom corner was a raised chip. “It’s a tracking device.”

  She slipped it in her pocket. When Agent Clark opened the door, the walls turned transparent again. He let her out first and asked the officer at the desk outside the cell to escort her to the front. “Your friend is already here waiting for you.”

  It was annoyingly sunny outside. Irene expected to find Annette waiting for her, but instead a familiar, beat-up blue car idled in front of her. She groaned before getting in the vehicle.

  “I’ve seen plenty of people spiral out of control before, but this has to be the fastest and furthest I’ve seen someone fall,” Elijah said. “Have you been on a bender since Monday?”

  “No,” Irene said. “Why are you picking me up?”

  “The precinct tried to call your wife, but her device was blocking calls. They called your friend Bennet next, but she’s at the hospital while her sister gives birth.”

  “Annette,” Irene corrected.

  “Yeah, that makes more sense. Since you’re still unemployed, they contacted your previous employer, and I was the only one who had seen you since you were fired. Err, resigned. So, I volunteered to come get you. I bet you’re ready to go home.”

  She looked down at her lap. “I can’t go home. Jamie and I split up.” Aiden could be over there at her apartment right now. She shook her head trying to get rid of the thought.

  “Shit, I’m sorry. Is that why you didn’t want to go home the other night at the bar?”

  “She’s been sleeping with my boss.” Irene bit her lip, holding back tears.

  “Damn, that really sucks,” Elijah said. “Wait, the precinct said you hadn’t gotten a new job yet.”

  “There wouldn’t be a record of it, would there?” It was suddenly so amusing, she laughed through her tears. “I’m working for a terrorist organization.”

  He turned to look at her. “What?”

  “Their cutting off men’s balls and transplanting them into other men,” she added.

  “Holy fuck, Irene. You really have gone off the deep end.”

  “I need your help,” she said.

  “But first, you need a shower.”

  ··OOO··

  The hot water felt good against her skin. She could feel the grime and discomfort from the last few days wash away and swirl down the drain. The door opened and Elijah came inside.

  “Can I get a little privacy?” she said. Only the thin white shower curtain shielded her from the rest of the tiny yellow-tiled bathroom. At least it was clean.

  “Oh, don’t worry, you’re not my type,” he said, sitting down on top of the closed toilet.

  “Well, you’re definitely not mine, either,” she said. Pouring more soap in her hand, she kept scrubbing her skin.

  “I’m trying to get this all straight in my head. That FBI agent asked you to investigate a terrorist group, you get a job with said terrorists, their president steals your wife then kidnaps you, and now your agent who got you in this entire mess is missing?”

  “Pretty much,” she said. “I’d bet anything that Aiden’s involved in Agent Rick’s disappearance.”

  “So what can we do?” he asked.

  She kept scrubbing. She wasn’t sure. “You want to help?”

  “Hell yeah,” he said. “It’s not everyday I find out about a terrorist organization and get the chance to take them down.”

  “I’m not entirely sure they even are terrorists,” she said. “I never uncovered a plan to bomb the Genome Database.” She turned off the water and wrung out her saturated curls with her hands. Elijah held up a towel and she reached from behind the curtain and took it.

  “That’s because it can’t be done,” he said.

  “Anything can be done,” she said, pressing the towel against her hair.

  “I guess I should have been more specific. You can’t bomb something that doesn’t exist.”

  “Of course it exists,” she said, wrapping the towel around her before stepping out of the shower. “We work with the database all the time.”

  “Right, right, it exists, but not how you think it does.” He got up and opened the medicine cabinet, pulling out a toothbrush still in its packaging. He handed it to her and said, “I bought this in case I ever had a woman over who was willing to stay the night. I guess you technically fit the description.”

  Irene gave a half smile. She brushed her teeth while Elijah kept talking.

  “When someone says Genome Database, the image that comes to mind is an entire floor of a government building dedicated to housing servers storing tons and tons of information. But that’s just not the case. The Genome Database isn’t centralized like that. It would be too vulnerable to things like terrorist attacks.

  “Instead, it’s decentralized. Imagine all the information that makes up the Genome Database as a jigsaw puzzle. With all the pieces together, you have a list of every person’s genetic code, while each piece remains relatively small. Remove one piece and you’ve got little bits of several people’s DNA.

  “Continuing the jigsaw metaphor, if you lose a single piece, there’s now a hole in several DNA strings. Instead of just duplicating pieces, there’s a second entire picture cut into a new puzzle in a different way. Sure, some of the pieces overlap, but if you lose a few pieces, chances are when you put it all back together, the total picture is still complete.

  “Now do it again and again. Take a hundred complete pictures of the genome and cut them into jigsaw puzzles a hundred different ways. Give each person a few pieces. Even though the pieces hold valuable information, they’re useless without the entire picture. If someone loses their puzzle pieces, no big deal, just look at the complete picture from one of the other puzzles and make a new piece and give it to someone else.”

  Irene spat in the sink, then stared at Elijah through the mirror. “So where are the puzzle pieces? The government would never trust citizens to hold onto them.”

  “They would, and they have,” he said. He pulled out his device and placed it on the sink next to her. “On every device for every person in the entire world.”

  “How is that possible?” she asked,
picking up his device and looking at it like she had never seen an object like it before.

  “Display storage usage.” The screen lit up and showed a list of how the ten petabytes of storage on his device were used. He took his device from Irene and scrolled to the bottom of the list. The last and smallest entry coming in at only a hundred gigabytes was titled ‘HGDCLD0x4E3DF6F68’. “That stands for ‘Human Genome Database cloud’, and the rest just references which piece of the puzzle is held on my device. So unless they’re able to wipe every device, there’s no way to destroy the Genome Database.”

  “How do you know all of this?”

  “I interned at a federal agency one summer in college. I learned all kinds of cool classified stuff.” They exchanged a look. Now they had both shared sensitive information the other needed to keep secret.

  “So, uh, do you need something to wear?” he asked. The thin little towel barely covered her. In a heap on the floor were her smelly old clothes which desperately needed washing.

  “You have anything I could borrow?” she asked.

  Elijah led her into the bedroom and pulled out some light gray gym shorts and a dark t-shirt with a local college sports mascot printed on it. He didn’t offer her any underwear and she didn’t ask for any. She could go without for a little while until she could get her own clothes from her apartment.

  “I have a question,” she said when she emerged from the bedroom fully dressed. “Agent Rick would have known that the Genome Database is decentralized, so why would he believe that it could be destroyed by terrorists?”

  He was already lounging on the living room sofa. “Devices are pretty sophisticated technology, but that doesn’t mean they're impervious to hackers,” he said. “I’ve never heard of an instance of a device’s data getting wiped remotely, but I wouldn’t completely rule it out.”

  Suddenly it made sense. “My device,” she said, her eyes wide. “I was telling my friend about AQD and she did a search for it on my device. It responded and said something before frying itself.”

  “Really?” he said, leaping to his feet with a look of excitement. “I have a hacker friend. If she could see it in action, maybe she could figure out how they do it and we can stop them.”

  “I’d rather let the FBI take care of it,” she said.

  “Oh, where’s your sense of adventure?” He put on a coat, and tossed a knit hooded pullover to Irene. “The FBI isn’t really listening to you right now anyway since they think you made that agent disappear.”

  “Fine,” Irene said, pulling the hoodie over her head. “Let’s go.”

  ··OOO··

  Elijah manually drove his car to his friend’s place. They travelled to the south side of town, parking only a couple blocks from Angel’s apartment building. They went into the ground floor of a high-rise in serious disrepair. The halls smelled of mildew and neglect as they walked to the staircase in the back. They only went up one flight of stairs before exiting the stairwell.

  The carpet squished under Irene’s feet, pools of slimy water left in the wake of her dress shoes.

  Elijah turned to her and said quietly, “Dora is a little… different. Just let me do all the talking.” She nodded, not expecting a totally normal, well-adjusted person to ever willingly live in an abandoned building like this one.

  Along the wall ran an extension cord which disappeared into a hole in the drywall. Elijah knocked firmly on the next door.

  It opened a crack and Dora peeked through, only her blue eyes and freckled nose visible.

  “Who’s there?” she asked.

  “It’s me,” he said.

  “I fucking know that. Who’s the broad?”

  “This is Irene. She used to work with me. We need your help.”

  She opened the door a little more, eyeing Irene like she was a dangerous animal.

  “Come in,” she said. Dora was wearing ratty clothing. Half of her head of blond hair was shaved off, the other half was in unkempt dreads.

  Irene slipped past her into the apartment. She expected the room to look just as disheveled as the woman inhabiting it, but instead it was nicely appointed in modern Swedish furnishings and full of high-tech equipment. It looked like a promotional picture advertising smart homes.

  “What do you need?” she asked curtly, crossing her arms in front of her chest.

  “I need your help,” Elijah reiterated. “There’s an organization that’s found a way to remotely wipe devices.”

  “Not possible,” she said. Her tone left no room for argument.

  “Is there a way to remotely overload a phone?” Irene asked.

  “Now we’re talking,” Dora said, the beginnings of a smile on the corner of her mouth. “Changing data on a device is restricted to just the user, but for troubleshooting reasons, the power supply can be tampered with. Use to be, only the user could make changes to power supply, but bugs happened enough that allowing back-end adjustments greatly increased the user experience. But having the back-end access introduces a whole level of fun hacking opportunities.”

  “Can you show me?” Irene asked.

  “I like this girl,” Dora said to Elijah. “Follow me.” She led them into another room which looked like an office littered with computer pieces, circuit boards, and microchips. There were at least six devices sitting on the desk. Dora picked up one that was a much older model and was missing the back cover. She turned it so the back was facing them, and Irene could see the inner workings of the device.

  “Okay, Cherry, allot one point five volts, three amps to charlie-papa-uniform three.” After she said it, the device gave a little beep followed by a bright spark. “That never gets old.” She examined the back of the device, pointing out a blackened chip. “See, the backup CPUs normally get power in sequence, but putting all the power allotted to them on one back up totally kills it.”

  Irene took the device from Dora as she held it out and looked closely at the blackened chip. “I bet this is what happened to my old device.”

  “Sucks that Cherry won’t repair old devices and just forces you to trade them in and get a new refurbished one,” Dora said. “Thankfully, I have these.” She pulled a box off the shelving unit behind the desk. With a small screwdriver, she popped off the old blackened chip and replaced it with a new one from the box full of all sizes of micro chips. “So how did you fry your device?”

  “I did a search for AQD.”

  Dora raised a single brow. “That’s it? Okay, Cherry, search for alpha-quebec-delta.”

  The device made the same beep before saying, “There is no…” The device gave off a flash of light accompanied by a pop. Dora examined the damage.

  “Oh,” she said. “This is quite clever. See here, the secondary RAM plug-in overheated. No big deal in this older model, because it couldn’t handle the voltage and just shorted out. But a newer device with modern architecture could potentially overheat long enough to destroy the hard storage next to it, effectively wiping the drive. Very clever. I should have thought of something like this myself.” She looked far too happy to have discovered a way to destroy her device. “I wonder what it was trying to say.”

  “There’s no such thing as AQD,” Irene said. “At least, that’s what my device said before it died.”

  “Let’s see if there’s more,” Dora said, pulling out more pieces from her box. She plugged in an adaptor where the secondary RAM had been, then put another chip in the adaptor. “This is a primary RAM for the top-of-the-line business model. It should be able to handle whatever we throw at it.” Once everything was situated in the back of the device to Dora’s satisfaction, she repeated the phrase, “Okay, cherry, search alpha-quebec-delta.”

  After making a beep, the device said, “There’s no such thing as AQD. There’s no such thing…” with the computerized voice trailing off in a deep baritone.

  Dora popped out the newly fried chip. “Okay, cool. Basically what you said happened to yours.”

  A sudden stabbing sensation caug
ht Irene off guard. She leaned forward, gripping her arms around her stomach.

  “What’s wrong?” Elijah asked.

  “He said he did an experiment on me.” The pang came again, but stronger this time. “I think… I think they might have implanted another woman’s ovary in me while I was kidnapped.”

  “Oh hell no,” Dora said. “I’ve already been involved in too much shady shit, I’m not getting sucked into this. Get out.”

  “Come on, Dora,” Elijah said. “We’re not getting you into any trouble.”

  “Get out!” she shouted, pointing at the door. Elijah led Irene by the arm. They hurried out the apartment, Dora right behind to slam the door closed once they were out.

  As they walked back to the car, Elijah said, “Sorry about Dora. She’s okay, she just gets a little over the top sometimes. How do you feel?”

  “Fine right now.” The stabbing was gone and now felt more like an ache. She wasn’t sure, but it could be a totally normal sensation at the beginning of a pregnancy. “We did learn something, though,” she added.

  “Right,” he said, nodding. “So, you think they did experiments on you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Florida could check you out, see what they did,” he said. “Let’s head over to her place.”

  She nodded. She was glad he was taking her seriously.

  ··OOO··

  “Elijah,” Florida hissed as she opened her door a crack. “You can’t just drop in here any time.”

  “I brought someone with me,” he said, pointing at Irene.

  “Irene,” Florida said, opening the door wider. “Come in! It’s so good to see you.”

  “You too,” Irene said.

  For once, Florida wasn’t wearing her trademark red lipstick, and her hair was a frizzy mess. She was dressed like she was ready to leave for the gym.

  “You know,” she said, licking her lips, “Victory said we weren’t supposed to talk to you after you left. But I don’t care. It’s so cool of you to come over.”

  “I was hoping you could do a scan for me.”

  Elijah started explaining, “She was kidnap…”